Piracy Prevention

Apple actively and aggressively enforces its intellectual property rights to the fullest extent of the law. Apple works closely with the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) to combat software piracy worldwide.

Software Piracy

Software piracy (the illegal copying of software programs) is a worldwide problem — more than $11 billion is lost to piracy every year. Because software is valuable, and it is easy to create an exact copy of a program from a single computer, software piracy is widespread.

The illegal copying of software programs is a crime! In the United States and many other countries, copyright law provides for severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of copyrighted material. Copyrighted material includes, but is not limited to, computer programs and accompanying sounds, images and text. Under U.S. law, infringement may result in civil damages of up to $150,000 and/or criminal penalties of up to five years imprisonment and/or a $250,000 fine.

Please join Apple in its piracy prevention efforts. You can report incidents of software piracy to the SIIA (see below section “Report Piracy to the SIIA.”) Also, you can help your business avoid serious problems with sound software asset management practices as explained in the section below.

Software Asset Management

It is important to manage software well, just as you would any other valuable company asset, in order to avoid serious problems. Apple aggressively enforces our company’s proprietary rights under the U.S. copyright laws, but we know that poor software asset management often keeps people from complying with the law.